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Introduction Introduction The Diary and its Author This work is based on an untitled, anonymous manuscript diary,' containing a vividly written and often lively sequence of daily entries, with no omissions even for high days and holidays such as Christmas and New Year's Day. The diary covers the period from Saturday 1 November 1834 to Saturday 30 June 1835. Thus it encompasses an academic year, in this case spent in Paris. The diary was written, presumably with a quill pen, in black ink now faded to a sepia-like colour in an unlined exercise book bearing a mottled cardboard cover and measuring 17 cms wide by 21.5 cms long. There are eighty leaves in the book with writing on both sides of all but the final page. The leaves are numbered in pencil by another hand on the recto side only. Following conventional practice, these are designated "r" and each overleaf "v" or verso. The work with its dated daily entries of varying length runs continuously from lr to 74r. There are thus 146 pages of text; these are followed by 11 blank sides. The manuscript is "raw" as first written. There is no post-Paris revision and most of the daily entries are likely to have been written at the end of a busy if not tiring day. And although there are occasional glimpses ofthe diarist's emotional state, the diary as a whole is a factual record of the observations, together with some valuable judgements, of a medical student following the work of a number of French surgeons and physicians performing either general or specialist clinical work in a wide range of Paris hospitals. The writer's observations on the cases examined in his presence reveals a generally sophisticated level of detail and analysis, indicating that he knew what he was looking at and for. Intermingled with these "professional" observations are the diarist's personal reactions to the sights he saw and to local social events and customs. Explicit details of authorship are absent but internal evidence throughout indicates that the author was a final year medical student from the University of Edinburgh. He refers to his "Note Book" where, as well as lecture notes, he recorded in greater detail the individual "history" of some of the cases he encountered, indicating their management and daily progress to either discharge or death. But this document has not been traced. The Note Book could also have furnished more precise details of gender, age, occupation and social class ofthe patients on whom he comments in his diary. He indicates that at the end of his period in Paris, following his return to England in late June 1835, he was to take his final degree at Edinburgh. This would have been an MD degree; Edinburgh did, however, also provide courses for intending surgeons. These were trained in the Edinburgh Infirmary under the auspices of the Edinburgh Incorporation of Surgeons. Further evidence within the diary strongly suggests that the diarist was James Surrage who lived in Clifton, part of Bristol in the county of Gloucestershire. The relevant evidence includes references by the diarist to letters sent to and received from Clifton, which he 'MS 7147, Western MSS, The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.93, on 26 Sep 2021 at 05:12:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002572730007352X Walking the Paris Hospitals describes as "home". There was also correspondence to and from Wincanton in Somerset. Furthermore, towards the end of his period in Paris, the diarist details a visit by his family including his father, who was keen to see some of the hospitals in which his son was observing and gaining experience with certain of the leading surgeons. This suggests that the father was himself a medical man, possibly a surgeon. Lisa Rosner, in her excellent study of medical students in Edinburgh between 1760 and 1826, shows that the medical profession, the army, the church and the legal profession represented the social background from which the majority of the 300 Edinburgh medical graduates between 1760 and 1805 came. They belonged to the same social class as that of the surgeons' apprentices between 1696 and 1730. As she expresses it, "Medicine then, seems to have been primarily an occupation for genteel, though not aristocratic, families".2 The List ofMembers ofthe Royal College ofSurgeons of 1840 lists two medical practi- tioners, James Surrage and T. Lydden [sic] Surrage, both in Wincanton.3 The older is Thomas Lyddon Surrage who had gained the qualification of MRCS in 1801 and whose address in the 1845 List is given as "Clifton Gloucestershire". The younger Surrage is James, who, like the diarist, had gained an MD degree from Edinburgh in 1835, having submitted a thesis on puerperal fever,4 a common cause ofdeath among women in childbirth throughout much of the century. James Surrage then went on to gain the less prestigious MRCS. The MD was the mark of a university education and requisite for the more elevated status of physician in England compared to that of surgeon or apothecary, both of whom acted as general practitioners but did not command the same benefits and esteem as the smaller number of physicians. Nevertheless, surgeons regarded themselves as superior to apothecaries. Living and Studying in Paris Like many other foreign medical students from the English-speaking world, especially North America, the diarist was, towards the end ofhis medical course, spending an extended period in Paris. By attending lectures given by many ofthe leading physicians and surgeons of the day in the Ecole de Medecine, and studying the patients in some of the capital's great hospitals, he would gain valuable experience. The tone and contents of the diary suggest that the diarist was a confident, highly organised but by no means boisterous young man of cultivated tastes in his early twenties. He opens with a declaration that he has "for a long time intended to keep a journal",5 and presumably considered November 1, when he was embarking on a completely new course in a new country, a most propitious time for putting his intention into effect. No motive for writing a diary is revealed. His observations on French women and details ofhis experiences during his midwifery course with Mme Lachapelle would suggest that he was not delib- erately preparing a gift for family reading. It seems doubtful therefore that he was keeping his diary as a justification for his time abroad. 2 Lisa Rosner, Medical education in the age ofimprovement: Edinburgh students and apprentices 1760-1826, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p. 27. 3List of members of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, R. Carpenter, 1840. 4List ofgraduates in medicine in the University ofEdinburgh, from MDCCV to MDCCCLXV], Edinburgh, Neill and Company, 1867, p. 105, where Surrage is listed as "Jacobus Surrage, Anglus", the form of his name used in the index separately bound at the back of the volume. 5Diary, Saturday 1 November 1834, ir, p. 41. 2 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.93, on 26 Sep 2021 at 05:12:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002572730007352X Introduction He sensibly sought a proper balance between his medical training and his cultural and social life in the French capital. An avid tourist who visited all the main landmarks of Paris and its environs, nevertheless, he did not skimp on his studies. To reach his hospital of the day on foot, before 9 o'clock, he had to get up early ifhe was to be in time to accompany the surgeon or physician on the ward round,6 and he was extremely good at organising his time so as to fit in his chosen single lectures or series of lectures on a specialist subject. He kept abreast of political events at home through regular reading of the imported English newspapers along with others published in English in Paris, such as the Messenger. The local politics of his home district in England certainly interested him and he saw developments there against the background of the somewhat turbulent national politics ofthe day in which the Whigs were gaining the upper hand over Robert Peel and the Tories.7 This process of ascendancy for the Whigs was anything but smooth and between 1830 and 1841 there were four changes of mainly Whig governments. But there was a Tory caretaker administration during November and December 1834 led by the Duke of Wellington. This was followed by another short-lived Tory administration under Robert Peel which ran only from December 1834 to April 1835.8 Events in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not isolated mainland European events. Calls for greater democracy for the population at large and anti-monarchist, pro-Republican sentiments were not unknown in Britain, and in 1832 the Great Reform Act was passed. The diarist's observations on the results of a recent local election involving a member of the Russell family, the Irish question and the fate of the government at home suggest that he was a Tory. Not surprisingly given the still relatively recent Napoleonic War, the diarist shows his ambivalent, even at times xenophobic, attitudes towards French culture, social behaviour, religion, modes of entertainment and food, as well as French theories and practice in medicine.
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